Viraj Khanna is becoming kind of a big deal in the art world

Don’t let Gen Z fool you: that #photodump isn’t as cavalier as you might think. Carousel posts filled with unfocused sunsets, underproduced selfies, blurry clips, and silly memes emerged in the middle of the pandemic and are now du jour—age no bar. They’re a radical break from the picture-perfect grids that millennials curated a decade ago and the hyper-commercialised feeds flooded with influencers you can’t even remember following. Instead, they seem to say: “Life is a hot mess and I’m too exhausted to fix the contrast, but hey, here’s 20 photos from November including one of me at my bestie’s new bar.”

This could very well be the caption for a recent work by artist Viraj Khanna. The piece stars a young man in leather pants, a clutch of paint brushes in his hand, clearly facing the camera as he leans against a high table crowded with pints of beer, paper cups, a three-tier cake tray, books, and a plant in bloom. Except, there’s a colour blast where our protagonist’s head should be. This is no JPEG (although JPEGS of it proliferate on social media); this is an embroidered piece of fabric mounted on canvas and hung on the pistachio-coloured walls of Rajiv Menon Contemporary’s booth at the ongoing Untitled Art Fair in Miami.  

This affinity for bratty nonchalance seems to be the new online aesthetic. “We live in a society where we are represented by images,” explains Khanna, the Kolkata-based 29-year-old artist who has, in four short years, emerged as one of the most exciting contemporary Indian artists. “The images we share create perceptions about us. We tend to share only our perfect side of life on social media. And this is something I comment on with my practice.” 

The son of fashion designer Anamika Khanna, he stumbled into fine art with paper-cut collages at the height of the pandemic. He posted these on Instagram with the hashtag #collagewave, his grid otherwise occupied by press clippings of the brand AK-OK and portraits with his twin on which he’d tag the Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic as a long-standing inside joke. Earlier, he’d joined the family business and was tasked with “pricing different embroidery samples and assessing quality”. 

His posts caught the eye of Somak Mitra, the founder of the Art Exposure gallery in Kolkata, who gave him his first gallery show in 2021. Soon, Khanna was painting and working with fibreglass to create cartoonish busts, before segueing into embroidery. “I am incorporating all those techniques that we have always used in our clothing [such as zardozi and ari] onto art for a different purpose,” he explains. The purpose remains two-pronged—to elevate Indian craftsmanship and to comment on urban youth cultures as they morph and mutate online. 

It’s a delightful combination of a hyperlocal form paired with a hyperglobal aesthetic; the people and places in his frames are made indelible with thread while their ephemerality is captured in a way that is impossible with smartphones today. Having received widespread appreciation for the immediate relatability of these images, Khanna’s work has been part of several gallery shows and been exhibited at major Indian and international fairs, including the recently-concluded Art Mumbai. But what shot him to the top of the emerging artists list was when his works were acquired and collected by the Bunker Art Space in Miami and the capital’s Kiran Nadar Museum for Art. 

So far, Khanna’s frames have been populated with people eating, drinking, hanging out, petting their dogs, waiting on streets, sometimes caught unawares by the artist. “I was earlier talking about the human condition and how we are always putting on a sort of ‘mask’,” he says. “The faces were made less flattering as compared to the original image I was working on.” But the people in the works displayed at the Untitled Art Fair, while still super stylish, have no faces at all. 

There is so much research on how social media leads to anxiety and depression due to the comparisons people make. The abstract faces [in my work] represent a sort of fluidity to the narratives and stories we share.

“This time I have abstracted them to look like paint, to bring attention back to the fact that everything is not as it seems. There is so much research on how social media leads to anxiety and depression due to the comparisons people make. The abstract faces represent a sort of fluidity to the narratives and stories we share,” he says. In this series, he has also attempted to blur the boundary between painting and embroidery, by playing with materials—astroturf, artificial leather, artificial leaves on fabric—as well as techniques like fabric manipulation and patchwork.    

So you have a guy in a red tee and black hoodie at Starbucks, a half-eaten cupcake and Frappuccino on the table, his palm curling into a question mark; or another one in a floral sherwani sitting in an armchair cradling a teacup in his fist; or a pair of travellers dressed in all black posing against a nondescript picturesque landscape. Young people at large in the world, doing the things young people do. Except their heads are clouds of static, grotesque disfigurations in saturated colours that you can’t take your eyes off. 

“In this series, Viraj is combining a realist practice, capturing moments from his life, with an abstract practice—the changing sense of self that young people experience as this new consumer culture emerges,” observes gallerist Rajiv Menon, who first connected with Khanna over Instagram a few years ago after being blown away by his exhibition at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi. It’s been a short road from there to now, working together for a show titled I-Pop: Encounters in Art and Fashion between India and the West, which also features artist Tarini Sethi. “This is autobiographical work, but he’s very much a chronicler of the everyday; of the new forms of spending, social media, socialisation that young people are experiencing in India today.” 

Khanna is currently intrigued and experimenting with ‘khakha’—the tracing paper used in the embroidery process—for his upcoming solo show at the India Art Fair in 2025 (he has another solo at Mumbai’s Tao Art Gallery planned for January). “I am using the needle holes in the khakha to create marks on different surfaces by applying paint over it,” he says. Deeply inspired by his mother’s fortitude, Khanna also believes “self-criticality keeps one evolving.” It isn’t surprising, then, that Khanna is sharpening his artistic prowess by pursuing an MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has him re-examining his understating of art. He concludes, “My ideas about what art is and how art is evolving have changed. The art we make says so much about the times we live in. It takes into account whatever has happened in the past while thinking of the future—by expressing it in the present. It preserves culture, creates awareness, and keeps us human.”

I-Pop: Encounters in Art and Fashion between India and the West, presented by Rajiv Menon Contemporary is on display at the Untitled Art Fair at Miami Beach, Florida, from December 4 to 8.